If the Lights of L.A. County Were Diamonds In the Sky…

…they still wouldn’t be enough to pay the tab for the county’s illegal immigrants. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich announced the latest figures yesterday:

A projected $650 million in welfare benefits will be distributed to illegal alien parents in 2013, county officials said Monday.

Approximately $54 million in welfare payments are issued each month, consisting of nearly $20 million in CalWORKs and $34 million in food stamp issuances, according to the data.

An estimated 100,000 children of 60,000 undocumented parents receive aid in Los Angeles County, according to Antonovich….

“When you add the $550 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to county taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year,” Antonovich said in a statement. “These costs do not even include the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually for education.”

And that’s in one county. The Senate immigration bill proposes to add tens of millions of low-skilled immigrants over currently authorized levels–legally! It is almost impossible to imagine how that influx would burden the nation’s welfare system, along with driving down wages for working Americans.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that illegals are able to come out of the proverbial shadows long enough to collect billions in welfare.